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majewsky

15,703 karma · joined January 5, 2016

This process emits code when Premium Cola is present on standard input.

https://xyrillian.de (podcasts and blog) https://github.com/majewsky Mastodon: https://digitalcourage.social/@xyrill

What I say is often colored by my work experience, but opinions are always my own and not those of my employer.

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majewsky··on Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
GP appears to be using "empire" as in "imperalistic" instead of as in "emperor".
majewsky··on Why top firms fire good workers
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".

majewsky··on Dead Framework Theory
Not quite. The central argument is that LLMs tomorrow will be based on what LLMs output today. If more and more people are vibe-coding their websites, and vibe-coding predominantly yields React apps, then the training data will have an ever larger share of React in it, thus making tomorrow's LLMs even more likely to produce React apps.
majewsky··on New gel restores dental enamel and could revolutionise tooth repair
If you're going to post AI slop, please read the room first.
majewsky··on Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
> He's now automatically in the conversation for the Presidential primary for 2028.

He was born in Uganda, so that ain't happening.

majewsky··on Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
They said they have _an_ option. They did not say anything about it being "great".
majewsky··on Addiction Markets
> whatever gets taxed is discouraged

Except when the behavior is too common, in which case it will become a relevant revenue source for the government, incentivizing them to encourage the vice. Case in point, here's the Japanese tax agency asking for ideas how to incentivize young people to drink more alcohol. https://soranews24.com/2022/08/17/japanese-government-worrie...

majewsky··on You Don't Need Anubis
Yes, this is where the term "security theater" comes from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_theater
majewsky··on Just use a button
Shush! That's a feature to avoid the 10-second mandatory wait on intranet links that their safety checker cannot possibly reach. :)
majewsky··on I am a programmer, not a rubber-stamp that approves Copilot generated code
[ ] Yes

[ ] ~~No~~ (requires Premium subscription)

majewsky··on Let's Not Encrypt (2019)
So this page does not open for you? http://neverssl.com/
majewsky··on Let's Not Encrypt (2019)
TOFU does not help if the ISP is consistently malicious, and serves me the MITM certificate on first use.
majewsky··on AMD and Sony's PS6 chipset aims to rethink the current graphics pipeline
False self-employment is judged solely by whether you spend 80% or more of your worktime working for a single employer.
majewsky··on Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26
> I have to say I find the liquid animations fun now.

This might be the most harrowing review that you can give without realizing it. UI animations are supposed to get out of the way. If you can recognize them as "fun", the most likely interpretation is that they are forcing you to expend attention, which in this age is one of your most valuable resources.

majewsky··on AMD and Sony's PS6 chipset aims to rethink the current graphics pipeline
If a US company hires you in Germany, either you get hired by their German branch or a personnel service provider based in Germany; and thus get paid "competitive" salaries typical of the country. Or you need to have some kind of setup where you are a freelancer or such and you figure out the taxation and statutory insurances and such on your own, which I'm not familiar with (my freelance IT consultancy side-business is rather simple because of small scale and only domestic customers). That will probably work, and if you manage to get a senior Silicon Valley salary, you would probably come out ahead by a bit after taxes and insurances. But you would probably need good tax advisors to avoid stepping in expensive loopholes, and if you work more than 80% for a single employer, the tax administration will be on your case because false self-employment is a possible method of tax evasion and has been outlawed.
majewsky··on Ladybird passes the Apple 90% threshold on web-platform-tests
Why does this need accelerometer support at all? The OS has that data and can instruct the app to change aspect ratio. Then all the website needs to do is to body.addEventHandler("resize", onresize).
majewsky··on Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available
> That means anyone "old" (over 40) and doing corp mgmt was probably also a military officer.

Absolutely not. It was very common in Germany to deny military service and instead do a year of civil service as a replacement. Also, there were several exceptions from the """mandatory""" military service. I have two brothers who had served, so all I did was tick a checkbox and I was done with the topic of military service.

majewsky··on Ask HN: Why is software quality collapsing?
Also, part of the etiquette is to only post when you actually have something to add to the discussion. If you just want to say "thank you", that's what the upvote button is for.
majewsky··on Sora Update #1
Sora 1 is slightly more expensive than Veo 3, at $0.50/second: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cognitive-... (select "US East 2" as region; not all regions have Sora).

Though again, caveat: Those are API prices. The real prices could be both lower (if there is a profit margin) or higher (if they are subsidized).

majewsky··on Sora Update #1
Eevee put it best:

> I absolutely cannot fucking stand creative work being referred to as "content". "Content" is how you refer to the stuff on a website when you're designing the layout and don't know what actually goes on the page yet. "Content" is how you refer to the collection of odds and ends in your car's trunk. "Content" is what marketers call the stuff that goes around the ads.

From https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/

majewsky··on How the AI Bubble Will Pop
You might want to recheck your example. Four generations ago would be my great-grandfathers. They were my current age around 1920. The first transcontinental (not just cross-national!) telephone call took place in 1914.
majewsky··on How the AI Bubble Will Pop
I am interacting with AI daily through Google products. YouTube is consistently giving me auto-translated titles that are either hilarious or wrong, and I desparately want to turn this bullshit off, but I can't, because it's not giving me an option.

That's the kind of adoption that should just be put up for adoption instead.

(And of course, the reason that I can tell that the auto-translated video titles are hilarious and/or wrong is because they are translating into a language that I speak from a language that I also speak, but apparently the YouTube app's dev team cannot fathom that a person might speak more than one language.)

majewsky··on How the AI Bubble Will Pop
You are correct that this is indeed a mostly unsolved problem. In chapter 15 of "The Mythical Man-Month", Fred Brooks called for all program documentation to not only for how to use a program, but also for how to modify a program [1] and, relevant to this discussion, for how to believe a program. This was before automated tests and CI/CD were a thing, so he advocated for shipping testcases with the program that the user could review and execute at any time. It's now 50 years later, and this is one of the many lessons in that book that we've collectively not picked up on enough.

[1] Side-note: This was written at a time when selling software as a standalone product was not really a thing, so everything was open-source and the "how to modify" part was more about how to read and understand the code, e.g. architecture diagrams.

majewsky··on OpenAI Is Just Another Boring, Desperate AI Startup
This is unrelated to the original assertion: "If they charged users what it actually costs to run their service, almost nobody would use it."

5 million paying customers on 800 million overall active users is an absolutely abysmal conversion rate. And that's counting the bulk deals with extreme discounts (like 2.50 USD/month/seat) which can only be profitable if a significant number of those seats never use ChatGPT at all.

majewsky··on OpenAI Is Just Another Boring, Desperate AI Startup
That is not what GP was saying. They were saying that a foundation model company would say "$CURRENT_MODEL is so good that it is no use training $NEXT_MODEL right now", which I don't think is the current stance of any of those companies.

Given that they are all constantly spending money on R&D for the next model, it does not really matter how long they get to offer some of the older models. The massive R&D spend is still incurred all the time.

majewsky··on AI Investment Is Starting to Look Like a Slush Fund
The amount of times I've seen Twitch streamers say "I want this game for myself to play off-stream, but I will play it on stream once so I can write it off as a business expense".
majewsky··on Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?
> Did you ever use DSL?

Where I live (Germany), lots of people have vDSL at advertised speeds of 100 Mib/s, using pair copper wires. Not saying that fiber is not better, it obviously is, and hence the government is subsidizing large-scale fiber buildouts. But as it stands right now, I'm confident that for 99% of consumers, vDSL is indeed enough.

In the 90s and 2000s, I remember our (as in: tech nerds') argument to policy-makers being "just give people more bandwidth and they will find a way to use it", and in that period, that was absolutely true. In the 2000s, lots of people got access to broadband internet, and approximately five milliseconds later, YouTube launched.

But the same argument now falls apart because we have the hindsight of seeing lots of people with hundreds of megabits or even gigabit connections... and yet the most bandwidth-demanding thing most of them do is video streaming. I looked at the specs for GeForce Now, and it says that to stream the highest quality (a 5K video feed at 120Hz), you should have 65 Mib/s downstream. You can literally do that with a vDSL line. [1] Sure, there are always people with special usecases, but I don't recall any tech trend in the last 10 years that was stunted because not enough consumers had the bandwidth required to adopt it.

[1] Arguably, a 100 Mib/s line might end up delivering less than that, but I believe Nvidia have already factored this into their advertised requirements. They say that you need 25 Mib/s to sustain a 1080p 60fps stream, but my own stream recordings in the same format are only about 5 Mib/s. They might encode with higher quality than I do, but I doubt it's five times more bitrate.

majewsky··on Linus Torvalds and the Supposedly "Garbage Code"
It's not a function, it's a macro. Just a text replacement rule without defined argument types.
majewsky··on Linus Torvalds and the Supposedly "Garbage Code"
> going around reviewing other people's discussions isn't really a valuable role in society

You are literally describing parenting, which has an extremely valuable role in society.

On a broader note, I recently had someone quote that classic adage "great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, simple minds discuss people" at me and I just had to push back. Conversing about the behavior of others is how, by design, humans negotiate cultural values, morals and etiquette. That's not something to be sneered at.

majewsky··on Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Is Causing Major Breakage for Some Executables
> Not a single comment is "Maybe I don't know enough about this to voice an informed opinion"

Survivorship bias.

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